As part of the technical upgrades of my web—updating the synchronization of local and online content—I accidentally republished something which I had erased from the surface of the Web...

This was the text which I wrote on Christmas-day last year when, alone—without my daughters that my wife had decided arbitrarily not to let me see, using a so-called "legal limbo"—I had to cope with the grief, the deception, the betrayal, the cold anger, the disgust, and a variety of feelings that had brought decades of doing everything together, to a point that precisely reduced to only this: a point. The pointless one of ideology!

I don't want to write this text again, although I feel it burning at the tip of my fingers... A friend told me to remove it. I wouldn't have. I would never have. But somebody else also seemingly asked me to remove—if not the text itself, at least an indirect reference I had made to them. It wasn't clear because on the one hand I could never understand this particular person anyway, on the other hand, it seemed unlikely she would have taken an interest in precisely this, and, in between the two hands, right through my heart, from the context at the time, she was very likely referring to something else, which was not wholly unrelated, but still something else. I couldn't ask her "what do you mean?" So in the face of a possible ambiguity, which I couldn't challenge, I decided to abide by it and humiliate myself to withdraw something I had written.

I removed it online, I purged it out—it's not easy to remove all traces of something from a mediawiki environment, which is built for versioning and archiving, for resilience and memory.

I had kept it on my local copy, for myself.

In the upgrades of those last days, it got transferred again to the open world, and became live for a few hours. I realized it, maybe subconsciously, fortunately very quickly, before this could be crawled and archived forever, as I'm precisely trying to bring back Google to index me.

I was commenting on my previous blog post how I tend to write long texts, how some texts are never written, or never committed, never sent, never shared, etc. By that I mean that I write a lot of drafts. Even my blog has a lot of unpublished/unfinished entries... This is a list of those on the main blog:

• Everything, anything and nothing (Last updated: 19:36, 18 June 2026)
• Brooding by the tutelary hills (Last updated: 00:50, 30 September 2025)
• The intelligent horoscope (Last updated: 14:39, 24 February 2025)
• Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (Last updated: 10:55, 23 July 2024)
• The 15 minutes of fame (Last updated: 16:16, 12 July 2023)
• Does Twitter cheat? (Last updated: 10:55, 20 October 2022)
• My biblical Burgess reading list (Last updated: 14:59, 19 October 2022)
• 218 days into the 3rd World War (Last updated: 11:54, 19 October 2022)
• Russia and Covid (Last updated: 15:05, 15 March 2022)
• The nightmare before Christmas (Last updated: 13:32, 9 January 2022)
• Quarantine camps (Last updated: 16:34, 3 December 2021)
• The world after covid (Last updated: 11:25, 27 November 2021)
• My conspiracy theory reading list (Last updated: 15:27, 21 November 2021)
• The end of democracy (Last updated: 14:10, 17 November 2020)
• Freedom of speech (Last updated: 19:55, 28 September 2020)
• New Year's Greetings (2016) (Last updated: 18:54, 13 August 2019)
• Saturday 8 December 2018 (Last updated: 10:59, 19 January 2019)
• How the dices pour (Last updated: 19:59, 7 August 2018)
• My September (2017) reading list: concentration camps! (Last updated: 19:24, 25 August 2017)
• My August (2017) reading list: Joyce (Last updated: 13:53, 23 July 2017)
• My June-July (2017) reading list: bombing cities (Last updated: 12:32, 23 July 2017)
• My ?? reading list: Victor Hugo (Last updated: 21:34, 23 May 2017)
• Pierrot le fou (Last updated: 11:38, 14 September 2014)
• MacGregor Despite Them (Last updated: 16:01, 21 April 2014)
• Spanish manifestation for dignity (22M) (Last updated: 16:19, 20 April 2014)
• The Voice of people and the deafness of power (Last updated: 17:35, 1 May 2013)

Those are not published because I didn't have time to complete them, or was unsure of the content, either the meaning or the quality, often both, or got interrupted and never came back to them. These are not confidential, they can be found. They could. Now my new syncing should see to it that drafts remain local. They're not presentable, but they're not hidden. I could show you, for instance, the draft of "Brooding by the tutelary hills", to take one entry randomly. The tutelary hills are those prominent, guardian-like mountain formations that surround south-American cities, where I was spending my birthday, as I often do, alone, since the date is a popular one for meetings, conferences or workshops. I used to write on my birthdays about the poor state of the world, because even though I was far from my daughters and far from my wife, I was in the company of my solitude only, I was happy, we were happy, albeit in a World that was increasingly marching towards its next cyclic catastrophe: a global war, a dictatorship, the decadence of society, probably various or all of these things combined. On this one occasion, however, Elena had already manifested her intention to send everything to shit, and I was in a situation where the greatest misery was mine and for me only. Here is what I had written:

Brooding by the tutelary hills

Today I am forty-eight. I have one year left before getting older than my mother was, when she passed away, like Brel, like all those people with a heart too frail to resist the encounter with a half-century:

Y en a qui ont le cœur si frêle
Qu'on le briserait du doigt.
Y en qui ont le cœur trop frêle
Pour vivre comme toi et moi.

I am, like for so many of my birthdays, like, maybe, for all of them, on my own, although this time I am lonelier than I probably ever was or ever will be.

I am not brooding about the war, this time, in the solitude of my hotel, or about the dying children fallen forever asleep in their blood and toys, I am brooding about myself. I have always known, God knows where from—from God himself, probably—I have always known that I would loose my parents at a young age, that I would loose my wife and that I would myself die young. My parents obliged. My wife decided a beautiful day of July that she didn't love me anymore. Being Spanish, she doesn't love (amar), she wants (querrer), so she doesn't want me anymore. I've also always known that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was after me and everybody who tries to extend their reach beyond their culture, their people, their pack of things one learned before you turn ten.

I've always said to Elena that she would 'abandon' me. That's the exact word I used, abandon. I was also using it to reassure our pets, our little dog, "on va pas t'abandonner". This was all as a sordid, subconscious joke. I never really believed anybody would abandon anything. Still the trauma was lingering from the future. I was telling Elena "you'll leave me when I turn completely blind". She always emphatically denied she would ever do something so horrible. Then came a time when she started to argue that she might leave me, but never on account of me becoming invalid, but if I'd ever turn into a monster, a child molester or a criminal or whatever would provide a justification. I stopped telling her. The mere idea I could become someone who could be abandoned was not funny anymore... it was becoming realistic instead. Isn't it ugly to abandon even the monster?

Oh, I am not a monster. I am probably not even the narcissist pervert or Asperger autistic or whatever Elena's psychologues have diagnosed me, without knowing or even seeing me. I sure am an introvert. I am, after all, a fairly standard species of INTJ.

Well, I didn't see it coming, although knowing it all along, but the time finally came when, like in Master and Margarita, ...

I don't know if I'll make it to the age of my parents. I still have a good four years before feeling this Buzzati's feeling that has haunted me since I first read it, in my teens, in the K. I remember, I already knew then that my dad would pass away soon. I also knew I'd die young. I don't know why, or how, I just know. I remember wondering if I'd ever feel this peculiar feeling. I'm still wondering this now, as I write. A few years left to know.

Well...

That's it. I don't remember what it is I saw in Master and Margarita that could justify not seeing something coming which you knew was coming all along. Now, it's a mystery.

The text is not very good. It's loose. It's incomplete... It's missing the Buzzati quote where the narrator mentions he is today the same age as when his father died, and the feeling he associates to that. It's broken-drafty in places. For that reason, I never published it. I liked the notion it was the last time I'd be younger than my elders.

In this particular case, however, the cause for interruption was also interesting. I had met another INTJ there at the foot of the tutelary hills, this type of monster that radiates no emotion, no feelings, who looks like a stiff, cold, detached statue who seems to have no inner angst troubling their majesty. But this one also had something else. She had, on top of this, also the exact opposite. She had this unmistakable fire of someone who was burning to say something. All this trapped in the icy, distanced, characteristic stance of superiority of the INTJ. I found it amusing at first... this clumsiness, this aloofness, this uptightness, trapped in a marble sculpture. I even thought we looked a bit the same, which already was a bit weird. This happens sometimes, it's rare—so highly I think of my own singularity—but I sometimes find someone whom I recognize myself in. Never a woman, though. This was the first time. And—besides, or maybe because of that—I also felt some sort of complementarity. Or maybe, surely, I was just affectively distressed to the point of lunacy. Yet, when a flame sparkles in the night of one's soul, this is not a flicker that one sees, not even a fire, this is a nebula. It also seems to me that this INTJ hadn't yet recognized herself. I was surprised that she felt she was pedantic. That's how the rest of the world sees INTJs indeed, but they know better. She didn't. She was charming like this, innocent, candid, good-hearted. But buried in this complexed, tortured, inaccessible exterior.

I was wrong, probably, surely, definitely, I was completely wrong, but I had this eerie feeling of having found someone who was familiar, who was similar, who was close to me. Close how? I don't know. I will never know. But at the slightest polite manifestation she did of answering me in marginally more depth than somebody else would have done—she was, after all, an INTJ—I got the feeling that we had met for a reason. I don't know which. But I thought I could figure it out. She acquired her own understanding of me right away: "this guy is mentally unhinged, mistook kindness for familiarity, is creepy and probably dangerous, emotionally unstable, doesn't know the first thing about me and still embroiled me in a cringy scenario that would be embarrassing even if remaining confidential but on top of that, he has a tendency of showiness and exhibitionism... that's my luck! I must defuse this quick and clean."

My own understanding was that nothing can be that fortuitous, that if at this moment of utter solitude, I had met someone who was even more alone than me, and was overflowing, this was for a reason. The reason, I reckoned, was that the orbs had invited us to sit on both sides of our loneliness and ask ourselves: is it the same one? How does it go for you?

Oh, I was wrong, okay. I thought she had a few things she could tell me, and that there were also a few things I could tell her, and that we would have learned something, about ourselves, maybe about the other one too, accessorily about all the others and the rest of the universe. I had the feeling she was like a song you like, one that speaks to you, that transports you, except that instead of being pre-recorded, it was live, it was alive, it was real, reactive, evolving. But it was singing inside, like those songs do.

Yes, I was wrong. There is more communication between a song that remains outside and someone who fell asleep listening to it, than there has been between us.

Oh, how wrong I was! I thought we were similar but we happened to be also completely opposite. The most perpendicular that two can be. She disliked me right away to the same extent that I liked her. You see, two people disliking each other still have something in common. Not even that, for us. To the point that I questioned if I was really an INTJ, after all. She was one, no doubt about it. This capacity she had to cut short when she starts losing even superficial interest, to change focus completely, to internally rewire in a way that looks like a full reset and a reboot of the operating system, this lack of concern, of emotion, of appearances, this preponderance of logic over empathy, which is so INTJish—and I've been reproached for that so many times, whence my knowledge of how superficial and mistaken this is—but at the same time, my incapacity for accepting, for bouncing off—for "giving-up", I would say, although this is, really, denial—..., well, all this isn't proper INTJ. She was. We were not even two INTJs despising each other. She had made me an INFJ sculpting a purpose into our incompatibility, drawing patterns by removing substance. I thought she was a mirror but it turned out she was a wall. One that was reflecting though. But still made of concrete. Yet, how irresistible, the cold, smooth, stiff surface of her barring the way of my arrogance.

Well, that's why I couldn't finish looking at myself arriving at that milestone where my parents left the road to take the shortcut to infinity, the one that is passing away, to jump straight into vacuum. I had found the infinite too. It was not standing on the horizon, though. It was planted in the middle of my road. I even touched it. I extended my hand and grazed its event horizon with my palm. I felt it too.

But that is another story. One that will never be written.

So back to my story. The one that was written. The one with this anchor who should have kept me safely preserved from drifting in the immensity of endlessness, thanks to the virtue of holy matrimony, children, family bonds, parenthood, etc. It was starting like this:

Over the period 2005-2025, I shared my life with that of Elena del Valle, at which point, she decided that she had had enough of me. Fair enough.

I met her when my father—and with him, my childhood—was dying. I have no doubt that God put her on my path towards Him at the moment where I most needed someone to keep going. I don't know why He thought that after twenty years, I was finally ready to carry on by myself, alone, on my own. Maybe He wanted to see me go a little bit unattended, too, with no safety net, with no reasonable, wise, responsible adult to put me boundaries, with nobody to keep me from going too far on the detours I always wanted to take. Well, we'll see how this goes...

and then carried on... That's a (non-readable) snapshot of the whole piece:

At least I hope that it's unreadable, because I promised two people that I'd remove it. I gave Claude the following extract from a previous screenshot and asked it if it was readable:

It said:

Claude:

Mostly, yes — it's heavily degraded (looks like a low-res or compressed screenshot run through some blur), but the prose survives at the level of whole words, so I can reconstruct nearly all of it, with a few words that stay genuinely ambiguous. Here's my best reading, uncertain spots bracketed:

Paragraph 1: "Now, on my own, for the first time ever, maybe my life is finally starting. «tout peut commencer, parce que tout recommence». How far will I go? How much further can one go without one's [tether/other]? How much more alone can one go without [love/her]?"

Paragraph 2 (between the stanzas): "We did a lot, more than most, much more. Not enough, I think… yet, still too much for Elena. Oh, how furious I have been when she refused to keep going! How hard I have been on her. I remained the same, but she changed. She wanted to become settled, average, quiet, peaceful. To me, I was hard on her lukewarm attachment to comfort, to reason, to boredom. But of course, I really was hard on her."

Final paragraph: "Elena was an artist. She still is, but to me she's in the past now. Something in me had moved the artist in her to accept my [excesses/caprices], my extravagances, to follow us in our adventures, those chased by the wild and curious child which I was, always wanting to open a forbidden door or do something inappropriate. I haven't changed. Or not much. I am the same me than I was twenty years ago. In fact a better me, and older me, but also wiser, more considerate, less excessive too."

The two indented colored blocks are French song lyrics — I can make out most lines (first stanza opens "si tu rencontres la femme / qui te transformera…", the second "si tu retrouves la trace / par montagnes et déserts…"), and the attribution line below the first appears to be a linked "— Nilda Fernandez" with an italic song title I can't resolve with confidence. Since those are lyrics rather than your prose I won't transcribe them in full, but they're legible enough that the song could be identified from the fragments.

So: reconstructible to maybe 95% for the prose, with the residual ambiguity concentrated in short function-word-adjacent spots ("one's ___") where the blur destroys exactly the words context can't fully pin down. If you're testing degradation limits, this is close to the threshold — a bit more blur and whole-word recognition would collapse into gist-only.

No big deal, eh? It was a long text. It got pretty quickly pretty more introspective.

Some people read it. It looks like everybody read it! Elena read it. Daniele read it. He's the friend who asked me to take it down. Elena's father, who was prominently featured, read it. Even Misha Portnoi read it. When he arrived in the conference hall in Yerevan for the PLMCN26, he told me from the end of the room: «I have read it, you know? I have read everything.» "What did you read?" I asked, genuinely oblivious. "Your letter about Elena, on your blog, you know, Charles Downing, you remember Charles?..." I didn't let him carry on: "Oh, this? Literature!" He's clever, he understood this was not a topic of conversation, he quickly changed the flow of his always insightful observations to something else.

This text, I will destroy it now, once and for all, because it keeps resurfacing, and will keep doing so. I don't like doing this. Destruction. That's precisely what I was complaining about in this very text. But I committed to it, to this friend, and to this other person who alluded to also being removed from it (possibly, I didn't understand). So this text will go. Because doing it halfway always means not doing it at all. Keeping one bit for you is really keeping it for the rest of the universe. That's the information paradox. You cannot remove anything from existence. Unless you pop it out in a Wigner bubble. Unless it never truly, or fully, or really existed, if it did only modulus some probability, some understanding, somehow. So I will shred the text. Maybe future technology will be able to reconstruct the full thing from the snapshot above, as Claude could on the insufficiently compressed version, which it almost reconstructed faithfully:

How much farther can one go without one's father?

is what it missed. Nice, wasn't it? I had written this for the fifth "anniversary" of my father passing away. I had put it on Google+, which got discontinued, and with it, the beautiful formulation. It survived Google+ though. And it'll also survive this blog.

There's another text which I destroyed. This INTJ I met, I had written her something. Oh, by the way, she's the other one who asked me to remove this text. Did she mean the blog about Elena? Or this text I had written her? I say I, but I don't think it's me who wrote it. It was dictated, really. It was coming from elsewhere. Maybe from me, but if from me, then from some deeper stratum, some subconscious layer of synesthetic perception. It was, in the most literal sense, a revelation, an hypnotic one maybe, a trance, the psyche finally speaking freely, I don't know, it came to me raw, pure, wholesome. I was crying writing it, so beautiful it was. It came as four pages. I told its intended recipient that the sky had spoken to me about her, and let me show you how neat this is. Don't you think I realize now how absurd, how shameful this is? Not "is", but "looks", rather. Because when you were looking at the material, it was beautiful. Really. It sounded true, this sort of true that means "natural, obvious, good". Like when the Genesis tells you "He saw that it was good." I was seeing that. I'm the only one to have read it. It was clear then that I hadn't written it. Now I don't know, because I forgot, and it's all gone.

It was not a love letter—it did not use the word at all—in fact it had little, if anything, to do with love. It had to do with the essence, the distilled, pure, concentrated version of something that is much more than love, something that you could call "meaning" or "finality" or "peace".

What, exactly, I know now less than ever, because I forgot most of it. Would you be able to spit out the Song of Solomon or the Book of Job like this, from memory? You only remember it was great. Try to convince someone of this by spurting it out. What was great, precisely? Any description even of the most clear-cut idea will trivialize the whole argument, will make it grotesque.

Anyway. I told her—my INTJ—I told her "I have written something for you, I want to give it to you, I think it's beautiful, I think it's the most beautiful thing that has been written, not quite by me—I would like to say, for me—but it was really written for you. I'd like to give it to you."

She said "No."

I don't even remember why now, but these four pages, without her reading them, had to vanish. They couldn't stay on a shelf. You don't keep a piece of the universe folded in a book. Like the Master's account of Yeshua Ha-Notsri, like Gogol's Dead Souls, this had to go. Where? Why? This was obvious at the time. Now I'm even doubting this happened at all. I burnt them in the chimney. I was feeling my heart burning with the words. It was intense. It was painful. It was celestial. It was its own sort of truth: rejection, nihilism, folly. It was crazy to write it and it was crazy to refuse it, it was crazy to burn it and it was crazy to risk such a thing getting lost, let alone destroyed, let alone incinerated.

It's a good thing none of this happened.

The craziest, though, would have been to accept it, to read it, to recognize it, to open a fork in the universe where such a missive would have been delivered. It's probably cowardice—a cosmological one—but somehow, although I'd never imagine she'd refuse such an artifact that had been sent through me to her straight from a council of angels, while I never had a doubt that she would accept it—if only for curiosity, if only for pathos, if only for pithy—I feel relieved that she didn't, that she had the nerves to say "I despise all of this to the point of not even wanting to entertain a second guess as to what it could be about". I don't know why. I understand very little of the full story, although I'm probably still the one who understands anything at all about it, but I feel this absolves me from something. Somewhere, sometime, it will earn me a cosmic pardon, for having been the messenger of myself, and be turned away, so that I didn't have to become anything more than anybody else: emptiness in nothingness. This peace is sometimes unsettled by the concern that, maybe, this song of songs, this revelation, this secret once shared and confessed, this cosmic dialogue, is not entirely lost, because manuscripts don't burn.